American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Majakovskij and Eisenstein Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary

Author(s): Elizabeth Henderson
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), pp. 153-162
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
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MAJAKOVSKIJ AND EISENSTEIN CELEBRATE THE
TENTH ANNIVERSARY

Elizabeth Henderson, Boston University

A picture, so the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. In

closely kindred works of 1927, Vladimir Majakovskij's poem
Sergej Eisenstein's film October (Oktjabr', or Ten Days t
World), it might be discovered that it ain't necessarily so. In
master craftsman like Majakovskij, the art of poetry has pow
the technological enfant terrible of the world of art, is at p
It's Good! and October emerge from a common aesthetic
experience. In the mid-1920s Majakovskij and Eisenstein cou
selves among the adherents of the Left Front of the Arts wh
and New Lef Majakovskij edited. The Left Front insistence
materials - whether the real voices of the revolutionary stre
buildings, objects, and participants in an historic event
documents valued over fantasy and imagination, guided the
of both artists. Both consciously strove to fulfill the Left Front
artists confront political issues, openly declaring their alle
revolutionary cause and dedicating their work to the constru
Socialist society.' Common to It's Good! and October is t
characteristic of so much of Soviet political art of the 1920s
to Majakovskij's 1917-1918 play Mystery Bouffe. Symbolizing
though the class struggle may be long and hard its outcome
bad guys are handled in a buffo manner, burlesqued or satir
good guys are presented in heroic style, more naturalistic bu
humor.
Majakovskij's poem and Eisenstein's film share roots in t
reenactment of the revolution in Petrograd, the 1920 pagean
of the Winter Palace in which over six thousand people took
them actual participants in the original storming. A hundr
citizens of Petrograd stood in the cold October rain to bear
triumphant spectacle.2 The tenth anniversary pieces, It's Goo
polish the crude devices of the pageant while preserving its ener
Like the committee that whipped together The Storming, M
Eisenstein create a montage of "essential moments," selecte

SEEJ, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1978) 153

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154 Slavic and East European Journal

contrasting styles. Their materials are the minimally falsified documents of

the revolution: the people and their voices in songs and speeches, the streets,
buildings and weapons of the revolution, the historical facts as vic-
torious partisans would remember them.
With the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution just
behind us, it seems appropriate to return to an earlier celebration when
memories of the original event were still alive in people's minds. The tenth
anniversary, like Lenin's death three years previously, was an occasion for
artists to commemorate. For the first time in history, a Socialist govern-
ment, overcoming seemingly insuperable obstacles, had survived for an en-
tire decade. Though far from the total transformation Left Front visionaries
had hoped for, the Soviet government had, in ten years, begun to make
enormous changes in the political, economic, and cultural life of the coun-
try. The tenth anniversary also coincided with the climax in the struggle for
power which followed Lenin's death. Trockij, who had been chairman of the
Petrograd Soviet in 1917 and a leader of the insurrection, delivered his last
speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in October 1927,
to be expelled a month later and exiled to the east. Joseph Stalin was
henceforth even more firmly in control. The "revolution of the spirit,"3 the
cultural revolution Majakovskij had proclaimed in 1918, was given one last
chance in the crash program for industrialization and collectivization of the
first Five Year Plan, and then postponed - indefinitely. It was thus with a
sense of urgency that Majakovskij, Eisenstein, and other Left Front artists
took up the anniversary theme.
Majakovskij composed It's Good! An October Poem between December
1926 and August 1927. He planned on doing theater and film adaptations,
but only the theater version materialized. The Leningrad Malyj Opera
Theater produced sections two through eight of the poem, which highlight
the events of 1917, as a tenth anniversary show. In the film world Ma-
jakovskij had heavy competition from fellow Left Front members. Four an-
niversary films were produced, three involving Lef contributors. Ester Sub
made The Great Road, a compilation film using old archive footage, clipp-
ings from earlier documentaries, and newsreels. Aleksandr Rodienko
designed the sets for Boris Barnet's Moscow in October, a reenactment of ac-
tual events filmed to look as much as possible like a documentary.
Eisenstein's October uses a similar technique, but Eisenstein is much more
daring in his use of filmic metaphors. The best scenes of October are far
above the level of the more plodding Moscow in October, which scurries
through Moscow streets avoiding electric wires and store windows. The
fourth of the anniversary films, The End of St. Petersburg, was the work of
Vsevolod Pudovkin. Though never associated with the Left Front, his film,
while it has a more or less conventional plot and was performed by Moscow
Art Theater actors, shows the formal influence of Dziga Vertov and

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 Majakovskij and Eisenstein 155

Eisenstein in its most effective passages of agitational montage, such as the

stock exchange sequence. Vertov did not make an official anniversary film,
but his production of that year, A Sixth Part of the World, celebrates the
achievements present and future of the Soviet Union with an enthusiasm
more appropriate, perhaps, for an anniversary piece than for its intended
purpose as an advertisement for Gostorg, the government trading agency.
Though the government commissioned both It's Good! and October,
creating works for this occasion was not a perfunctory filling of a factual or-
der for either Majakovskij or Eisenstein.4 The revolution had a special
meaning for them as artists and men. Majakovskij makes his purpose in
writing It's Good! explicit in the poem - he wished to communicate what
the revolution meant to him politically and in very personal terms. By
recreating both its famous events and its more humdrum everyday
hardships and joys, he hoped to keep alive and transmit to others the spirit
and energy needed to carry revolution farther:
I wish
that after being with
this book a spell
Out from apartments' petty world
Shall march again
on shoulders
of machine gun shells,
Glinting
like a bayonet
with my verse.
That from this book
through joyous eyes,
from this happy witness -
into tired
muscles
shall arise
the strength
for construction
and rebelliousness.5

The initial sketch for Eisenstein's film was close to the final version of
Majakovskij's poem. Working from a scenario of over a hundred pages for
a vast "film epic" by A. Efimov, Eisenstein wrote his own scenario in Oc-
tober 1926. The first three parts coincide roughly with the final film.
Parts four through seven continue the historical review through the Brest-
Litovsk Peace, the building of the Red Cavalry, the years of intervention,
typhus, and other hardships, the Perekop victory, and a culminating appeal
to begin Socialist Construction.6 Essentially this is the outline of It's Good!,
but as Majakovskij worked on the poem, what was originally a
documentary acquired lyric dimensions as well. Unlike his previous long
poem Vladimir Il'iE Lenin with its three long narrative sections broken only

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156 Slavic and East European Journal

by flashes of satire and repeated oaths to the proletariat and the Communist
Party, It's Good! takes the form of nineteen short episodes or "poem
details" - a form Majakovskij first explored in his scenario How Are You?7
Each episode of It's Good! could stand alone as a separate poem. Ma-
jakovskij, however, combined and arranged them with particular care for
their cumulative emotional impact.
After announcing the purpose of this poem in the first episode, the
poem chronicles the historical events of 1917 in a series of six anecdotes,
alternating satire and heroic pathos. The poet appears in the last of these
scenes which recounts his late night encounter with Alexander Blok in the
midst of the revolution, and then records the sounds of the revolutionary
streets and countryside. Episodes eight and nine introduce themes of
Socialist patriotism and bourgeois incomprehension. The central section of
the poem, the tenth episode, presents Soviet Russia surrounded by White
armies and foreign interventionists. Life within the circle, Majakovskij's
own experiences, and events from the Civil War occupy the next five
episodes which contrast lyric and documentary sequences. Then the circle is
broken; the sixteenth episode narrates the end of the war. The final sections
look forward in time to what the country will become and backward to the
revolution's honored dead. Elegy gives way to ode as the poem concludes on
a Whitmanesque note: Majakovskij affirming his sense of sharing in all that
his country is and will be.
Because of the pressures of a tight shooting schedule - a mere eight
months from March 1927, when the anniversary committee approved the
final scenario, until November - Eisenstein was forced to reduce his initial
plan and limit the film to October in Petrograd. Even thus shortened,
Eisenstein was not able to complete the film in time for the anniversary and
only a few fragments were screened at the celebration in the Bolshoi Theater
on 6 November. There are reports that the film came under political
scrutiny and that shots of Trockij had to be cut. However, very little is
known about what went on between November 1927 and the final release of
the film in March 1928, when Eisenstein wrote: "October is ready. It is ready
and not ready. A year of completely overwhelming work. By the end this
year wore us out."8 With much fanfare a few years ago Grigorij
Aleksandrov, Eisenstein's collaborator, released a full version of the film -
but all he added were a few shots.
As released in 1928, October chronicles the revolution from the
toppling of the Tsar in February 1917 through Lenin mounting the podiu
to address the Congress of Soviets in October. It is the public spectacle
the revolution: revolutionary troops marching; the rituals of diplomacy; t
trenches of the war; bread lines; the anti-Provisional Government
demonstrations of July; the clash of Kerenskij and Kornilov; and the fin
military victory of the Petrograd workers under the leadership of the
Bolsheviks.

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 Majakovskij and Eisenstein 157

There is no room in this scheme, as there is in Majakovskij's poem, for

Eisenstein the young engineer turned artist, who, when he should have been
constructing bridges for the Red Army, sketched hundreds of designs for
theater productions. Eisenstein's personal vision informs his film in a
different way and appears with greatest power where he is freest from
canonical events, as in the opening of the bridges. In this sequence
Eisenstein makes us see the metal of the bridges, feel their ponderous weight
contrasted with the shimmering waters of the Neva as only he could do. Our
attention is riveted to the drama of the bridges by Eisenstein's choice of
images - the dangling horse, the long silky hair of the young woman who
tried to flee to safety across the bridge. The real objects become a metaphor
for the revolutionary struggle. Similarly in the dance sequence: Bolshevik
agitators have gone out to talk to Kornilov's Savage Detachment.
Eisenstein builds suspense by allowing the camera to linger over the exotic
armaments of the Caucasian warriors. The dance dispels the tension in an
ecstatic image of international unity.
The American filmmaker Stan Brakhage has pointed out that
Eisenstein returned again and again to these ecstatic moments of heightened
rhythm and violent motion. He did this not, as many have suggested,
because they were realistic, because, for example, alternating the face of a
gunner and the muzzle of a machine-gun in two-frame shots conveyed the
real feeling of a gun at work, but because this was the quality of Eisenstein's
own vision.9
By contrast, the almost total absence of hyperbole and metaphor in It's
Good! is unusual in a major poem by Majakovskij. There is only one in-
stance of the associative metaphoric flow that characterizes A Cloud in
Trousers or About This in It's Good! and it is reserved for a particularly
emotional moment. The initial pages of section fifteen chronicle the
hardships of the Civil War in the matter-of-fact tones of a newscast: the
economy is at a standstill, a locomotive has run out of wood, work brigades
mobilize to chop the fuel needed, five people freeze to death, rumors spread
of the approach of Denikin's army, snatches of the hopeful voices of his
middle class sympathizers resound, the Party responds with the slogan,
"Proletarians, to horse!" This chain of briefly summarized events is in-
terrupted by a shift in the level of emotion and in poetic diction:
Today
the day
entered in a plunge
its shriek
rending the hush,
wheezing away
through its shot up
lungs
it fell
and expired
in blood. (301.)

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158 Slavic and East European Journal

The passage realizes the metaphoric cliche "bloody day." Then the
blood itself comes alive: it drips ("kaplami / kapala"), the sounds evoking
the name of Lenin's would-be assassin, Kaplan, whose name in turn
suggests the form of the revolution's enemies, "fourlegged . . . jackals,"
("cetverolapye ... .akalii"). The sound-play carries through the Bolsheviks'
response. The Cheka terror raises the "paw of class" ("lapa
klassa") against the "white-fanged monster." This is one of the few
instances in the poem of the sort of personified hyperbole that predominates
in the class warfare of 150,000,000 and Vladimir Il'ib Lenin. Instead of
metaphors and imaginative fictions, It's Good! "drinks from the river named
'Fact,' " to quote the poem's prologue (235).
The central event of the poem, of course, is the October Revolution and
its most dramatic moment - the storming of the Winter Palace.
Majakovskij's interpretation of this event is markedly different from that in
Vladimir Il'ib Lenin. In commemorating the leader's death, despite all his ef-
forts to avoid doing so Majakovskij made Lenin into the epitome of the
historical process, the one ruling intelligence commanding the actions of the
working masses. It's Good! redresses this imbalance. The first harbinger of
October sounds in the angry voices of peasant and worker soldiers who are
fed up with the Provisional Government and give their backing to the
Bolsheviks. Section two quotes their long lists of empty promises. The
alternation of long lines and very short ones heightens their militant irony:
They lied:
"the people -
freedom,
forward,
epoch,
dawns.. ."
for nought.
Where
is the land,
and where
the law,
to give
us land
by spring? -
Nothing!
What
do they give
for February,
for work, for not going
AWOL? -
Fuck all. (238.)

Lenin's leadership is mediated through the consciousnes

Bolshevik. In rough colloquial language the worker recoun
tions for insurrection. His speech is sub-literary, sprinkle

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 Majakovskij and Eisenstein 159

matical forms,"iz voennoj bjury," ("from the military bureau"), military

jargon, "samokataina" ("motorized units"), and colloquialisms, "t6ka-
t6ka" ("just now"), "ne delat' zavenden'ja pitejnovo" ("don't get drunk").
At the same time Majakovskij conveys a heroic eloquence to the determined
and business-like words of his worker: "Either I will take the telephone
[exchange] or I'll give up my proletarian soul." The worker quotes Lenin
setting the date for the insurrection: "Tomorrow, he says, is early for a ris-
ing. / But the day after tomorrow is late. / That means, tomorrow." (250-
52.) Eisenstein quotes the very same lines as titles in October. Both
Eisenstein and Majakovskij used John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the
World as their source.
For the storming of the Winter Palace Majakovskij tried to achieve the
effect of a newsreel. Several other sections of It's Good! - the scenes from
the intervention and the end of the Civil War - reveal the same techniques.
The storming, however, is the longest and most complete episode in the
poem. In writing about film montage, Eisenstein once remarked of
Majakovskij's stepladder lines that he divided the lines not along their
grammatical borders, but along the borders of cinematic "frames."'10 In the
storming episode, Majakovskij cuts both the lines and the narrative flow
into a series of dynamic shots linked primarily by chronological association.
The action begins at an already high pitch. Majakovskij cuts back and
forth from the revolutionary forces gathering in an "iron ring" around the
Winter Palace to the demoralized defenders of the Provisional Government,
establishing suspense with the conventional device of the adventure film,
much as Eisenstein does in October. The entire episode in the poem could be
analyzed into a shot list for a documentary-style film like October. Here is
an example from the opening scene:
Long shot: the Neva River with ships Carrying Red
Sailors from Kronstadt.
Close up: their bayonets.
Long shot: a car speeding along a road, its hood
bouncing with each bump.
Close up: Kerenskij in the car, an expression of
panic on his face.,
And juxtaposed to his pitiful flight, a title,
recalling his fierce anti-Bolshevik
declaration: "By the horns, / the bull! /
Those rebellious slaves! .. ."
Long shot: a few stars in the dark sky.
Medium shot: the Keksgol 'mcy, revolutionary troops,
marching up Mil'onnaja Street.
Close up: Lenin in disguise at Smolnyj, pacing
rapidly, deep in thought.

This series of short, dynamic flashes of action continues throughout t

episode.

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160 Slavic and East European Journal

Like It's Good!, October shows Lenin in Smolnyj, the Winter Palace
with the ranks of its defenders thinning as the siege closes more tightly
around it and the ministers sitting amidst its ornaments. The cannon shots
from the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, the Cruiser Aurora hovering on the river,
the huge mass of people charging across Palace Square and into the Palace,
the contrast between their simplicity and its grandeur, the revolutionary
soldiers putting an end to looting, and Antonov announcing
that the Provisional Government is deposed - all of these moments are
common to film and poem. Juxtaposing the two, however, reveals how
much more rhythmically compelling Majakovskij's poem is than
Eisenstein's film. With a few well-chosen words, Majakovskij suggests a vast
array of elements from the most varied categories. He is more laconic than
Eisenstein by the means of silent film. The poet has greater success in har-
nessing the historical artifacts to the formal demands of his medium. The
elaborate mechanics of the storming on which Eisenstein lavishes much
precious footage remarkably are not memorable. Soldiers march, hands
grab guns, trucks roll through the night, speakers mount and leave the
podium at endless meetings. Eisenstein is too slavishly devoted to the
meticulous details of these preparations. The rhythm sags. The Palace with
its incredible wealth of bric-a-brac proves to be stronger visually than its
mass of invaders.
Only towards the very end of this sequence is Eisenstein able to
generate rhythmic momentum. He does an extraordinary trick with film
time using the clock which ticks off the minutes till the deadline of the
Bolshevik ultimatum. The clock first shows 11:30, then 11:40, 11:50, 11:55,
11:58, and 12:00. In actual time the first interval lasts three minutes, the
second - five, the third - two, the fourth, three minutes on the film clock,
stretches out to four minutes, and the final two minutes last another three.
Real time compresses and expands according to the needs of the film.
This motif of clocks is more fully developed in the scenario than in the
final film (77-86). As in Trockij's History of the Russian Revolution,
Eisenstein's scenario plays on the wonderful irony that the iron precision of
the Military Revolutionary Committee caused the insurrection to come
twenty-four hours late, on the morning of 25 October instead of 24 October
as planned. I would suggest that it was this, and not shots of Trockij, that
led to the re-editing of the film.
It is important to keep in mind that October marked a turning point in
Eisenstein's approach to film art. Its best passages - the raising of the
bridges, the sequence of the gods, the dancing - were experimental.
Eisenstein was seeking a new level of expressiveness in film which would
allow him to convey intellectual messages in highly emotional images. He
dreamed of filming Marx's Das Kapital using devices from James Joyce's
stream-of-consciousness technique." It's Good!, by contrast, was the last

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 Majakovskij and Eisenstein 161

epic poem Majakovskij was to write, the culmination of ten years of poetic
practice is responding to the latest events in the history of his country and its
revolution.
In conclusion, it is necessary to contrast the underlying political
message embodied in the structures of these two works, so close in other
respects. Both stormings end in Smolnyj with the Bolshevik-dominated
Congress of Soviets. Eisenstein's climax shows Lenin mounting the podium
accompanied by the cheers of the Congress. Majakovskij, in harmony with
the poem's emphasis on the common soldiers, concludes with the entire
Congress triumphantly singing "The International."
Framing the events of the storming, Majakovskij evokes the cold wind
of October, an oblique reference to a line from Blok's poem about the
revolution, The Twelve - "Wind, wind, over all God's earth."'2 In
Majakovskij's poem the wind and the trams that never stop running lend an
everyday note to the historic events of the night. In contrast to his usual
hyperbole, Majakovskij effectively understates the significance of the great
upheaval. In the opening lines the winds blow "under Capitalism": they
continue, "as always," in the concluding lines, only "under Socialism" (254,
263). The balance in the poem between the everyday and the heroic speaks
powerfully to its audience of the significance of every single member in the
struggle to build the commune - a vision of revolution far more faithful to
the mass ethos of the 1920 Storming of the Winter Palace than Eisenstein's
more orthodox conclusion.

NOTES

1 See the Lef program in the form of three manifestoes in LEF: Zurnal levo
iskusstv, 1 (March 1923), 3-11. Two of the manifestoes are available with other th
articles in English translation: Screen, 12 (1971-72), 25-58.
2 For descriptions of the pageant by two members of the committee which directed
Petrov, "Massovye revoljucionnye prazdnestva," Teatr, 1957, No. 8, 89-96 a
Deriavin, "Vzjatie Zimnego dvorca v 1920 g.," in Sovetskij teatr: dokumenty i m
(L.: Iskusstvo, 1968), 274-75.
3 Majakovskij called for "the revolution of the spirit" in his "Open Letter to the
Gazeta Futuristov, No. 1 (15 March 1918).
4 The distinction between a factual order and a "social command" was crucial for Ma-
jakovskij. He fulfilled orders because he wanted to, sensing without being told what the
"proletarian state" needed.
5 Vladimir Majakovskij, "Xorolo!" Polnoe sobranie socinenij (13 vols.; M.: GIXL 1958),
VIII, 236. I have revised the English version of It's Good! by Herbert Marshall in
Mayakovsky (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 364-72. Marshall translated only the first
and last sections of the poem, which has never been translated in its entirety.
6 These events occur in another version in "Acts" (5-9). See Sergej Ejzenitejn, Izbrannye
proizvedenija (6 vols.; M.: Iskusstvo, 1971), 67-86, 425-45.

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162 Slavic and East European Journal

7 See my translation of "How Are You?" in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 7, Fall
1973, 161-76. See also my analysis of the work in the same issue, "Shackled by Film: The
Cinema in the Career of Vladimir Majakovskij" 297-320.
8 Sergej Ejzenitejn, "Nag Oktjabr '," Kino, 13 March 1928. The process of making the film
is described by Ju. Krakovskij, "Kak sozdavalsja fil'm Oktjabr '," in Iz istorii kino (M.:
Iskusstvo, 1965), VI, 40-64.
9 Hollis Frampton, "Stan and Jane Brakhage Talking," Artforum, 11 (1973), 72-73.
10 Sergej Ejzengtejn, "Montai 1938," Izbrannye stat'i (M.: Iskusstvo, 1956), 281.
11 Sergei Eisenstein, "Notes for a Film of Capital," tr. Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and
Annette Michelson, October, 2 (1976), 3-26.
12 Aleksandr Blok, "The Twelve," Sobranie socinenij (6 vols.; M.: Pravda, 1971) III, 233.

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